


The Price of Smoke

by foolhappy



Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Angst and Feels, Blood and Violence, Canon Compliant, Destiny Lore, Exos | Exominds, F/F, Female Exos | Exominds, no betas we die like men
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-05
Updated: 2020-07-06
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:15:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25081492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foolhappy/pseuds/foolhappy
Summary: The life and deaths of Kali-0 through -9, and everything she was before and in between.Or,Philosophical explorations of identity, morality and ethics, love and loss, and the cyclical nature of history as told through the medium of an exo guardian’s journey toward self-actualization.Or,My love letter to Destiny lore.
Relationships: Original Character(s)/Original Character(s), Original Exo Character(s) (Destiny)/Original Human Character(s)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 7





	1. Operating System Error

░ PRERECORDED AUDIO FILE SUCCESSFULLY DECRYPTED ░  
░ COMMENCING PLAYBACK ░

[beep]  
[rustle]

[humanoid steps, a chair sliding across cement flooring]

[silence 00:38.41]

[an exo’s simulated inhale] 

I see a woman when I dream.

[silence 00:06.92] 

[simulated exhale] 

No, I'm sorry. That is not accurate. When I dream, I see many people. Everyone, in fact. Everyone I have ever seen; even ones I don’t remember glimpsing in the spaces between the Tower and each task. I think I’m even sure that it is everyone previous Kali’s must have seen... or known. I think I know this because of that woman.

[00:03.83]

I think I am not supposed to talk about this. It feels... painful, in a— how to describe it?— an oily way. Like it is something about me I should hide. Every other exo I have met has never— well, all but one has always skirted the subject.

When I lay down to rest, I am lucky if in the morning I do not remember the night. Do you see? ... No. No, it is all right I will say it again: When I dream, as I suspect when many exos dream, it is a looping nightmare. It begins calmly, with a tower— not this one— and a field like walking on the sun, if it were gentle. There are others there, standing and walking and everything else, and I know I want to reach the tower. I must. Everyone is separate and no one acknowledges each other, and I begin to walk through crowds.

This makes sense, you may think, it is a metaphor for the lives we touch in our path as Guardians. Pasting poetry on reality, I have seen how you can be. But it is not so. The linear walk becomes a crucible, sometimes sooner sometimes later. It is like a survival algorithm that humans and awoken can ignore, but I cannot. Like a vex simulation, but its goal is my perpetuation. The seed: What if every person, any person, I have ever seen tried to kill me?

[noise, like shifting weight in a poorly balanced chair]

Now you see? Yes, I think you do. Every night that my ghost is not keeping my systems from overheating, when I am off-duty and solitary and without excuses remaining, I lay my head down to sleep and yet I dream of killing. It is with my bare hands until my subconscious wonders a weapon into an acquaintance’s grip. At night I strangle children in front of gutted, disemboweled mothers, fathers. I splinter limbs and ruin faces until the matter behind them ceases to run. There is no rest in exo dreaming. Only warring, warring, our servos whirring, working, til we are only ever winning.

Except her.

I record this because I am sick of wondering. I am not _you_ , smiling only if there is a question yet to answer.

[00:07.22]

I do not always see her. I think the processes that make me up wonder over her like I do, and code her in every now and then to test me. Because... When I see her in that place, it is not the simulated gore, the predicted pain, the alien cruelty I made that will sicken me when I wake— no. With her, something is broken. Sometimes, she is like the rest and she tries to kill me, too, but with her, I never win. It’s like I do not try. Sometimes, she only stands there, and for all I stand and stare and scream, I cannot really see her. Even now I could not describe this woman to you. She is smaller than me, I think, but she does not feel that way in sleep. When she is there, I nearly forget about the tower, the field, the hundred, countless, infinite others.

I never kill her. I don’t think I can. Even when the dream wonders “what if she didn’t fight back?” I haven’t. Not once. My best friends, I can pop their eyes beneath my thumbs and throw them screaming over my shoulder; my mentors and wards, I can kick them until they’re halves. Yet I do not even know her. I have spent _years_ wondering which Kali did. Or if she is even real at all, or if she is just a blurry bit of code, just a fail safe of my operating system so that the, the horrific predictive cycle hardlined into me never reaches any rational terminus. That I will never have peace, never _not_ be killing, never be more than a machine of war, and if not, then who, _who_ is the woman I see, because—!

[00:08.64]

When I wake from dreams of her, it is grief that galls me.

[04:29.72]

[an exo’s simulated sigh]

Well. If your big head can make anything of that, let Kali-5 know. Because _I_ am sure as shit never going to send this.

[a ghost’s beep]

"Sure as shit"?

[noise, as of a humanoid standing from sitting]

I don’t know, I heard Cayde-4 say it the other day, and it seemed tonally appropriate for the—

[rustle]  
[beep]

░ END OF AUDIO FILE ░

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No, I will not be keeping this storytelling style through the rest of the fic lol. ;P I just needed to get something out, get my fingers moving, so I could stop being a baby about it and get this story idea out on paper (so to speak).


	2. 404 Not Found

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw: body dismorphia

Before she knew anything at all, she knew something was wrong. The lights of her eyes clicked on, her primary processors spun smoothly inside her chest, the relay coils beneath her helm logged initial queries and layered them in resolutions, as they should, she should ignore those— Everything was operational, and it was all wrong. 

“Startup process successful,” a woman’s voice said, nearby. “No errors.”

“Core temperature is high,” a different voice noted, cadence overfast by 0.29 seconds than average. He was nervous. She shouldn’t know this.

“Keep an eye on it.”

An eye. She shouldn’t have eyelights. She did know this, somehow, though subsystems checked deep referential databases within picoseconds and pinged, reassuring, that yes, she should. Her apertures clicked— _those aren’t the right words_ — and the room she saw was— 4.12 meters by 3.64 meters by 2.89 meters, 17 degrees, 113.57 lumens consistent— _I shouldn't know that_ — 

“Ancillary processors at 44%,” the nervous voice relayed.

“Running what operations?”

“Uhh, peripheral analysis, undirected. Data sorting.”

They were talking about her, weren’t they? Like a thing. She was not a thing. She was— she— 

“What data?”

“New, but redundant. She’s creating a logical spiral. Ma’am, she’s going to loop herself again—”

“Give her a minute.”

A rational subset of her core noticed she was trembling; ran diagnostics and troubleshooting as a larger portion watched. A dizzying sensation wracked her, interrupted the processes; a spidering of nonsense data like trying to calculate the natal point of a fractal curve. The hydraulic network in her chest reflexively vented, titanium ribcage compressing, but it was wrong. Root processes— basic, imperative, but strangely buried and discrepant— shrieked FATAL ERROR into the neural paths, completely incomprehensible but completely adamant that something was _missing_. Absolutely, 1=0, _wrong_. 

Iͥ neͤeͤdͩ ᴛⷮoͦ вrͬeͤaͣᴛⷮhͪeͤ. They said. Screamed. She felt buzzing within the wires of her neck. Only wires and tubing, electricity and light. No air. Iͥ'́mͫ noͦᴛⷮ вrͬeͤaͣᴛⷮhͪiͥng. The thoracic power series suddenly pinged pressure warnings. The hydraulics were clamping backwards, had jettisoned all air and were now somehow creating a suction; forcing metal against metal as she panicked. Iͥ aͣmͫ dͩ y iͥ n g. Frantic, emergency subroutines snapped on and brutishly shunted power to afferent data compiling.

“APUs at 63% and climbing!” 

The nervous voice was loud and far away. The room should feel very cold, but that data was irrelevant, and therefore discarded. Relevant were the streaming error reports of multiple processes running in simultaneous disconcert _against_ each other: one trying to deconstruct and reunify aberrant code; another desperately parsing that code and trying to stack it, structure it, create the program that was clearly missing; one struggling to divert primary cognition away from internal servos and stop disrupting system processing with its tremulous attention; yet another bypassing the constantly increasing error queues and demanding immediate coherent override. 

“97%! _Ma’am_!”

“I can _see_ the numbers, doctor!”

They were yelling, but they had no right. She was dͩyiͥng, something was wrong, very wrong. She cͨaͣn'́ᴛⷮ вrͬeͤaͣᴛⷮhͪeͤ,̓ cͨaͣn'́ᴛⷮ вrͬeͤaͣᴛⷮhͪeͤ should be the one yelling, shouldn’t she? But it was already so loud inside, it shouldn’t be loud. There should be one voice, not this splintering, shattering, spiraling, spinning; illuminated, invisible cacophony; streams of numbers and sounds only she could hear; this wasn’t _right_. She didn’t know how, or why, or what— 

“Your name,” the woman’s voice was hard, urgent. “What is your name?”

All fans stuttered, pumps jerked back to static positions, servos whistled, stopped, reversed. 

Her name?

“What is your name?” The voice was slower, softer, blurry. 

Proprioreceptors knew she had not moved from supine since waking— is that what she had done?— trembling had stopped, but the nonsense data rush was back. Dizzy. Lost. 

_Name?_ She queried down every relay, every wire. Name? She listened to the echoes spidering into every database, every index, and bouncing back null. _Name? Name?_

The bed against her arm felt wrong. It gave beneath her weight more than she did against its pressure, and that made sense, but it _didn’t_. The air around her was cold; she knew it, sensed it, but it was separate from her, and _that_ was a not-wrong wrong, too. Code realigned, reconfigured, adjusted. Critical protocols hysterically and tentatively hardwired a new imperative: 🅆🅁🄾🄽🄶 🄲🄰🄽 🄱🄴 🅃🅁🅄🄴. Illogical, nonsensical, and crucial. Ignore the offset. Introduce acceptable margin of error. Dial onto one query. One.

_Name?_

What was it? What was _she_? Apertures fluttered, facial hydraulics tensed, mouthplate metals creaking, all of it _wrong_ — No. Focus on one. 

Question: Name?   
Parse: What is name?  
Addendum: What is _my_ name?  
Error_Thrown: Interrupt: Question: What is me? What is me? What  
Qualify: Question =/= What  
: Question == Who  
Parse: Who is my name?  
Rejected: Syntax  
Qualify: Question =/= Name  
: Question == Self  
Parse: Who is my self?  
Qualify: Redundancy  
Parse: Who is self?  
Rejected: Syntax  
Parse: Who am I?  
Question: Who am I?

All routines tallied code in tandem, the superficial and correct programming with the buried and unrecognizable; all unified in scouring systems, cores, routines, and rules for the slightest byte alluding to…

She turned, ignoring another stream of not-wrong wrong from peripheral tactile input. Finally, she saw more than dimensions, shapes, calculations. Screens, tables, glass, wires and cables an incongruous mess against otherwise pristine. A screen near her was turned off, black and reflective. For the first time, she saw herself.

Red eyelights. W͑͝r͛̈́o͑͘n͐̓̈́g̔̓̕. Not wrong. Facial hydraulics slackened unwittingly, and she must have made a noise— her first— because red mouthlight flickered for just a moment. She moved suddenly, quickly, and she wasn’t listening to the two voices from before anymore. Irrelevant. Standing on blue feet, blue arms rose, touched blue metal fingers to a blue metal face. W͑͝r͛̈́o͑͘n͐̓̈́g̔̓̕. Not wrong. Crowned with gold.

“Kali.” She said the name, the word, her first. But the voice.

It was wrong.

Her scream was shrill, distorted, blown out and short.

REBOOT. REBOOT. REBOOT.


End file.
